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depths with patience, compassion and a never-ending, adamantine determination.
    As she twisted her spindle and drew out the raw, cleansed wool into a fine thread, her mind ranged upon the night wind, far to the north, to the west, and to the south - seeking, asking and questing for the object of her search. Nimue had never cared for magic, nor truly believed in the secret world of spells and curses. Such primitive superstitions had been the subject of much mirth between herself and Myrddion in those happy days when her children were young, before his eyes clouded with blindness.
    ‘I see better now that I’m sightless than ever before, sweet Nimue,’ he had consoled her. ‘My spirit leaves my body, and sees you as you are. It journeys far, beyond my fleshly strength, to watch my friend, Artorex, and the struggles he must fight in the south and in the east. Even Morgan, poor sad Morgan, feels the edges of my presence. How she jumps as she darts around her malodorous, old woman’s room and searches for me.’
    They had laughed without malice, but in her heart Nimue had not believed him. Myrddion had sensed her anxiety that his mind was failing and her blue eyes had welled with tears, even while she had laughed at his jokes. There were times, deep in the night, when he had woken and begun to speak in a voice she scarcely knew, describing strange wagons that needed no horses, spears that destroyed cities of glass and the great tapestry of human history that stretched out before his eyes to the ends of time. She wondered then if her husband was truly the wisest man alive, or only lost in the dreams of crazed old age.
    She had recorded his visions, for he had no memory of them once he had spoken them aloud, and then husband and wife had puzzled over their meaning.
    ‘Most of the future is closed to me, my dear,’ he had told her, his craggy, still-handsome face turned towards the light. ‘You should consign my dreams to the fire. Magic doesn’t exist but, perhaps, some inner vision does. And if such insight is true, it can trick us into relying on it when our minds and hearts are what should guide us. So put my dreams aside, my beloved, for they are only the shadows of shadows.’
    But Nimue had disobeyed him and had begun to weave and embroider her wool into a fitting record of the glory of his blindness. Nimue believed in her heart that her man was not a magician but a great poet and that towering images crowded his still-young brain. But then, after the funeral pyre, so filled was she with hot, scarfing grief that her three sons had had to carry her back to their mountain villa and her mind had descended into a pit of madness.
    Wild-eyed, she had threshed and fought through unspeakable nightmares until her sons had been forced to bind her to her bed. Bleeding willow trees, scorched rosebuds, crucified women and blind dragons had assailed her in her horrors, until her sons had quailed to see the welts rise on her white flesh as she mutilated herself.
    Then, as sudden as her violent descent into madness had come, her senses had returned. That night, she had dreamed of struggling through a wilderness of half-sentient trees that guided her towards bloody water and a willow tree that hid an unimaginable horror. Screaming, she had been impelled by unseen hands to part the weeping foliage of the tree while her eyes had willed themselves to close, for she knew she would find her own self beneath the blood-soaked branches.
    But her strength was as nothing against the power of the dream.
    ‘Nimue!’ the demon had called. His strong, right hand had gripped hers, while his left hand had shielded her eyes. Then, just as she was fainting with terror, he had drawn her back into the hollow tree and the comforting nest of her bed. Her dark-haired lover had kissed away every burn, scald and tear that her hands had branded on to her flesh. His dark eyes had drunk her in until she feared her soul would be lost to this demonic creature of